He began an Arts/Law degree at the University of Sydney, but in his first week at the old Law School in Philip Street saw men only a year older than he was wearing three-piece suits and carrying furled brollies along with their pink-ribboned files. Somehow he completed first-year Law, thus gaining an Arts degree, then ran to the employment pages of the Herald where he found and answered an ad for graduate teachers in what was then The Territory of Papua and New Guinea.